Corporate cooperation and contribution equals COLLABORATION
Hi, I’m James from Bath and North East Somerset Council. In the last few blogs my colleague Tim has outlined our journey in improving our website and the techniques we have employed. Today I’d like to talk about the vital role that collaboration plays in being able to achieve many of the positive outcomes we’ve seen.
We’ve recently been working with services in a number of workshops, the aim of which has been to help us understand the services they offer, gain some insight into their customers and for us all to discuss the ideas we have about how to present their content on the website.
These sessions have been going extremely well and we’ve been really pleased not only with the progress we’ve been able to make, but also with how the services have risen to the challenge of working at the speed of our sprint cycles.
Lately we’ve been working closely with services and their subject matter experts (SMEs) on our parking and travel topics, in particular trying to tackle the complex subject of the resident and business parking permits we offer. Their willingness to help us understand the topic and to provide data and information has been a huge help.
It doesn’t stop there however; our team of in-house developers have volunteered their help to provide us with online look-ups to our spatial database. So in the future residents will be able to check which parking zone they live in and potentially the availability and cost of permits, all from the permit pages on our site. This will be a huge step forward from the current journey to find this information that involves finding this information in different places on the website (including our mapping system).
We are also currently working on a writing style guide to aide content designers, using the GDS version as a basis. However to be of use to us it needs to incorporate guidance specific to our authority and I’ve received great support from the press officers in our Communications and Marketing team who have committed to contributing their knowledge to the guide.
We would never have been able to achieve what we have so far without the freely given collaboration of so many people within our organisation. Moving forward we plan to centralise our content creation activities on the website and establish an ongoing role for SMEs as an interface between content designers and the council’s services. Inevitably this will pose challenges but from what I’ve seen so far I’m confident that we can make it work… by collaborating.
